Flutie Seems to Have a Knack for Creating Memorable Moments

FOXBOROUGH, Mass., Jan. 6 - If Sunday was to be the last time Doug Flutie stepped onto a football field, it would make a fitting coda, a final highlight-reel moment in a career that has unspooled like a football lifer's dream.

The man who is frozen in time as a college senior at Boston College is 43 now, and beneath his baseball cap, lines stretch from the corners of his eyes. He has a daughter, Alexa, who is 17 and considering colleges as her father ponders retirement.

She may go to Boston College, too, where her father threw one of the most famous passes in college football history, a 48-yard touchdown pass as time expired to upset Miami in 1984, a pass that has become known as the Hail Flutie.

Flutie has been thinking about retiring for nearly a dozen years now, so perhaps it is appropriate that it was a throwback play -- a drop kick, of all things -- that neatly provided the bookend to the play that first made his a household name.

"You get through your career and people move on in a hurry," Flutie said Thursday in the Patriots' locker room. "People are going to forget. At least I have a couple of moments that are going to be lasting moments."

Flutie was named the American Football Conference's special teams player of the week after converting the drop kick for an extra point in the regular-season finale against Miami, a 28-26 loss. He said he felt a bit guilty about snagging an award for what amounted to a cameo appearance.

Flutie will play again this season only under the most dire of circumstances, if quarterback Tom Brady goes down during the playoffs, which the Patriots begin Saturday night against the Jacksonville Jaguars. But Flutie remains more than just a locker-room curiosity; he is still so immersed in the daily minutiae of football, in running the scout team in practice, that he has not taken the time to reflect on his Forrest Gump-like career.

"I look at it as a constant struggle, from year to year, week to week, day to day getting ready for games," Flutie said. "It's all about this week, this day. You don't have time to look back over the big picture too often."

Belichick came up with the idea of having Flutie try it, after he heard the ESPN sportscaster Chris Berman say that he had seen Flutie drop kick when he starred in the Canadian Football League. Flutie had never done it in a game, but had goofed around with the drop kick for years.

To execute it, the kicker stands about 10 yards behind the line of scrimmage, takes the snap, drops the ball to the ground, then kicks it after it bounces. Belichick called Flutie into his office about a month ago and told him to start preparing.

The drop kick has been made more difficult since the previous one was converted on Dec. 21, 1941, when Ray McLean of the Chicago Bears did it in a 37-9 victory over the Giants in the N.F.L. championship game. Footballs are more oblong now, and the pointed ends make the trajectory of the bounce harder to predict.

"We started practicing the drop kick and I thought, with anybody else, you've got to be crazy," punter Josh Miller said. "But everything he touches seems to turn up roses."

When Belichick spoke about the kick after the game, he made it sound as much like a farewell toast to Flutie as a paean to a lost art. "I think Doug deserves it," he said Sunday. "He is a guy that adds a lot to this game of football, has added a lot through his great career -- running, passing and now kicking."

That career has been played, for the most part, out of the spotlight, in Canada. Flutie won the 1984 Heisman Trophy, then went to the nascent United States Football League. He bounced around the N.F.L. from 1986 to 1989, which included two-plus seasons as a backup in New England, before settling into stardom in the Canadian Football League.

In eight record-setting seasons, he led his teams to three Grey Cup championships and four Grey Cup appearances, and he was named the league's Most Outstanding Player six times. The last of his championships and outstanding player awards came in 1996 and '97 with the Toronto Argonauts, his final seasons in the C.F.L.

He was 35 after the '97 Grey Cup, and ready to retire. Until the Buffalo Bills called.

He made the Pro Bowl in 1998 and was named the N.F.L.'s comeback player of the year. Retirement kept being pushed aside -- for three seasons in Buffalo, for four in San Diego and finally, for a chance to return to New England, to give Alexa a full senior year at Natick (Mass.) High, where her father also went.

After the season, Flutie will sit down, as he has after the last few, and decide whether it is time to stop.

"The last 12 years, I've said, two more years, two more years," he said. "I'll enjoy it the day I eventually retire; I'll have no issues with that."